Restless Billionaire (13 page)

 
          
‘You
can’t beat yourself up forever. You said yourself that you’ve paid them back.’

 
          
She
was more than moved by the glimpse of the man she’d met that first night and
terrified that he would see something of her reaction. She pulled her hand
free. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’

 
          
She
didn’t see the way his jaw clenched. And to her utter relief Daniel came in at
that moment and brought tea and coffee, and cleared away the dinner plates.
Sebastian served them both and then indicated that they should take their
drinks into the living room.

 
          
Aneesa
curled up on a big chair far from the couch where Sebastian was once again
sprawled out, his long powerful body attracting her eyes more than she could
resist. He’d flicked a remote and the low soothing tones of jazz flooded the
room from discreet speakers. To try and distract herself from the seductive
music she asked, ‘
So
what about you? How did you end
up in the hotel business?’

 
          
He
cast
her a
glance, clearly reluctant to divulge
anything. Aneesa was just regarding him steadily.

 
          
Sebastian
felt a constriction in his chest. He always did, whenever anyone wanted to
probe into his life, and yet … he’d just asked Aneesa about her life and was
still reeling slightly from the depths she’d hidden from him, and the world.

 
          
He
ran a hand through his short hair, the gesture unconscious. ‘I remember being
taken to a hotel with my brothers and sister for one of our birthdays when I
was much smaller. It was one of the best hotels in London and I’d never seen
anything like it.’

 
          
He
wasn’t about to reveal to Aneesa how it had made an impact on him because it
had been so ordered and sleek.
A world away from their
chaotic home life in rambling Wolfe Manor, which had been too huge to instil
any kind of order.
He also wasn’t going to reveal how his father had got
blind drunk and the staff had discreetly whisked him away to a suite until he’d
slept the excess off. And how that was the first time Sebastian had ever seen
anyone make his father and his embarrassing behaviour disappear.

 
          
On
some level since then, he’d wanted to have that control, and as he’d grown
older, he’d wanted to
own
that
control. Ironically he’d never felt in less control right now.

 
          
Instead
he just said to Aneesa, ‘I went to college and studied business and economics.
Once I inherited my share of my father’s money, I invested it in a hotel in
London which was just a shell of a dilapidated Georgian building. It’s right
beside an old church, so I saw the potential for it becoming a wedding venue as
well as being a perfect base for a hotel. I had an excellent architectural
design team, and once that one had taken off, the rest followed all around the
world.’

 
          
‘You
must have been so young—that’s an incredible achievement.’

 
          
He
looked at Aneesa and was blinded momentarily by the chocolate brown of her huge
eyes, and the way she was backlit by the inky starry London sky. He cursed
himself. What was wrong with him? He hated the pride that suffused him even as
he clamped down on it.

 
          
The
truth was, that for all of his success he’d long ago dismissed compliments as
they invariably came with strings attached. But Aneesa had sounded utterly
genuine. He came from a family of high achievers and had never felt that his
had been any more than anyone else.

 
          
He
looked away. ‘I was young, yes, but no younger than you when you became a
success.’

 
          
Aneesa
felt the sting of his tone. He hated talking about himself and his innate
modesty made something inside her feel weak, when she was used to dealing with
huge egos.

 
          
‘You
have a lot of brothers and … one sister?’

 
          
He
glanced at her and again she had the distinct impression that he was only
answering on sufferance and at any moment he’d clam up and tell her to mind her
own business.

 
          
‘I
have five half-brothers and one full brother, Nathaniel, the actor.’ Something
indecipherable flashed in his eyes before he said, ‘And yes, I’ve one sister,
Annabelle. She’s a photographer.’

 
          
‘Do
you see them much?’

 
          
He
looked at her properly now with a clear warning in his eyes and answered
tightly, ‘We’re all in different places and see less of one another now, but if
we’re in the same city we endeavour to try and meet up.’

 
          
‘Your
father …?’

 
          
At
that Sebastian rose to his feet with a fluid move.
Tension
crackling off his form.
‘If you don’t mind I have a couple of things to
attend to in my study. I’ll say goodnight.’

 
          
Aneesa
nodded faintly and said goodnight, watching as he strode out of the room.
And I’ll ask you not to poke your nose into
my private life again
was all he hadn’t said.

 
          
Aneesa
put down her cup of tea and curled back into the chair. Sebastian was more of
an enigma than ever. The fact that she was carrying his child clearly didn’t
give her access into his family history. And why was he so guarded about it?
All she’d been able to glean from the tiny bit of research she’d done was that
there had been some scandal, and that his father was dead … and no matter that
he said he saw his
siblings,
evidently they weren’t
all
that
close.

 
          
Aneesa
forced her mind away from the torrent of questions and waited until she knew
Sebastian was likely to be well ensconced in his study before she went to bed.

 
          
A
couple of nights later Aneesa couldn’t sleep and sat watching the gloriously
beautiful inky skyline of London from her bedroom window. The questions
reverberating in her head were no less now than they had been. But Sebastian
couldn’t have made it clearer that she’d
strayed
too
far off the path. They’d shared meals, but he’d skilfully diverted all
questions away from himself and focused solely on her. He was as stubborn as a
mule.

 
          
And
through it all, making Aneesa go slightly
crazy,
was
the ever-ratcheting sexual tension she felt, when she had no indication from
Sebastian that he felt the same.

 
          
She
caught looks every now and then but he’d look away and she’d feel like she’d
imagined them. That she was fantasising. And, she assured herself now, she
was
. Sebastian was putting up with
her, that
was all. They’d had one night, and that was it.
The only reason they were together now was because of the consequences of that
night.

 
          
She
sighed deeply and had to acknowledge that, despite everything, she’d settled
into Sebastian’s somewhat ascetic apartment. She’d noticed his patterns of
sleeplessness over the weekend, hearing him get up and move around or go out
only to return an hour later, because invariably she was awake too,
her
body too hot to sleep. Hot with the changes due to the
pregnancy and hot because she couldn’t seem to stop having lurid X-rated dreams
about him.

 
          
And
she’d also noticed his punishing regime of exercising. If he wasn’t out jogging
he was down in the private gym either swimming length after length or punching
a boxing bag.

 
          
She
remembered that he’d been in the pool that night she’d burst into his suite in
Mumbai. She longed to ask him why he insisted on such a regime but knew he
wouldn’t welcome her curiosity.

 
          
Despite
mentioning his extensive family, he had no pictures of them dotted around the
apartment. Aneesa thought nostalgically of her own chaotic family home in
Mumbai where you couldn’t move for knocking down a slew of pictures of her huge
extended family.

 
          
If
it hadn’t been for Daniel, who lived in the apartment directly below Sebastian’s,
she would have felt very lonely. Aneesa had shown Sebastian her book on
pregnancy and asked him if he wanted to read it, and when she’d seen the way he’d
paled she’d hurriedly taken it back. She knew the baby hadn’t been planned and
that this was hardly a conventional situation but he seemed to react in such a
viscerally negative way that she longed to know more about
why
that was. Even though she knew he was hardly likely to tell
her.

 
          
Daniel
had long gone home and Aneesa was in bed as Sebastian sat in a chair in his
study and looked out at the glittering view of night-time London, with its
millions of lives and stories unfolding.

 
          
The
past few days had been torture for him. The reality of having Aneesa in his
apartment—asking questions, under his feet, around every corner, her scent
lingering in the air, listening to her husky laugh while talking to Daniel—was
enough for him to think he was going demented. Her barrage of questions the
other night had made him feel like a cornered animal. She’d pushed so many
buttons at once that it had taken all his restraint just to get up and leave
her.

 
          
And
yet, curiously, he felt no compunction to see the back of her, which was a
contradiction that did not sit well with him. As if by osmosis things had
already started to appear—a bunch of flowers in a vase in the hall which Daniel
had defensively declared had been for Aneesa, to brighten the place up; a
cashmere scarf thrown casually over the couch in the living area; a pair of
sneakers by the main door that looked tiny enough to belong to a child which
had precipitated the memory of
that
night, when he had removed her wedding shoes and kissed her hennaed feet … and
there was still her scent, everywhere her scent.

 
          
The
thought of taking another lover while she was here now was … impossible.
As impossible as it probably would have been even without her
presence.
She filled his every waking and sleepless moment. She was all
he saw when he swam length after length, or as sweat dripped into his eyes when
he punched out all of his nameless aggression; and curiously for the first time
the aggression was harder to pull up. He found the punch bag annoyingly
ineffectual now. And he’d craved it all weekend.

 
          
And
the baby—all the talk of doctors and arrangements about this tiny being who was
still being formed had made him feel disconnected. Whenever Sebastian tried to
think about it, he felt a leaden weight inside him, like he just couldn’t
connect with the reality. He envied Aneesa’s clear bond; he saw the way her
hand would unconsciously go to her belly and her face would soften, her eyes
glowing with some secret light.

 
          
But
the truth was
,
becoming a father terrified the living
daylights out of him. There was so much to fear; that he would become as cruel
and mercurial as his father had been. As irrational as it was, he had a
visceral feeling that perhaps this could be passed down in the genes. And, how
could he know that once Aneesa had the baby she wouldn’t succumb to depression
like his own mother had? It had been exacerbated to the point that eventually
his mother had ended up in full-time care when he and his brother had still been
tiny. The effect of that had been devastating, and was still felt today.

 
          
He
didn’t want to be responsible for creating an awful legacy like his parents
had, and had nothing to go on in terms of seeing how his siblings might handle
it, as none of them had had children yet.

 
          
Sebastian
had known very few moments of stability in his life, so to try and contemplate
it now was … impossible. And in truth he didn’t want to contemplate it because
the memories it brought up were too painful. He’d already begun having
those
dreams again and knew it was the
prospect of the baby that had sparked them … because he was terrified that any
child of his would endure what he had endured.